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Preparing For GSoC 2016

It was early December, I was randomly checking different android open-source repositories to start contribution for the first time. During that period, I was learning Android Development through Udacity Android Nanodegree Program.

While checking different repositories, I came across FOSSASIA’s open-event-android project. The idea of the project was to parse JSON data responded by the server and display the event details accordingly in the app. The project was active and there were active developments going on. I was looking through the open issues for an easy issue to start with. I found an issue of “App crashing on bookmarking any session”. I build the project in my machine and encountered the same bug on bookmarking any sessions. I quickly checked the log and tried to fix the exception. When I first solved that first bug, I was very happy, my interest increased and I became regular bug-fixer. I kept on contributing, adding new features, fixing bugs, adding Roboelectric tests, and many more.. You can see my contributions here. During this period, my 25 pull requests were merged. I love this open-source contributions.

In the month of January, I came across WomenWhoCode’s android project which aims in expanding the network of connections among engineers. I like this project idea and also keep on contributing here.

Few weeks later, I came across BuildmLearn’s project called BuildmLearn-Toolkit-Android. It is an easy-to-use android app that helps the users make another mobile apps without any knowledge of android application development. The toolkit helps creating mobile application with various functionality and allows teachers to input their custom content. Targeted at teachers, this toolkit helps them make learning fun and engaging through mobile apps. This project interests me a lot and it will be helping education in many remote areas where we lag educational facilities. I made several pull requests and some of them were merged in bug-fixes branch and some were still open. I observed that users cannot install multiple applications of same template at the same time. So I proposed a solution(in GSoC proposal) to change and make the android package name unique for created apps through templates.

Finally on March 1st, organisations list was out. Both FOSSASIA and BuildmLearn were selected and WWC didn’t applied for GSoC.

I have submitted proposal for both the organisations and I was selected in BuildmLearn-Toolkit-Android project. I have a vision to improve the toolkit, make it more user-friendly and materialistic. This is the first time I have applied in GSoC, and was over-whelmed on getting selected.